Watching Ken Burns' documentary on the War, I note that it's been ten years since my mother died.

When she was alive, her defining features were her inability to locate her reading glasses (which were usually on top of her head), her strong desire that I eat healthy (including "hiding" wheat toast on the bottom of a tuna sandwich topped with a disguise of white toast), and her inability to throw anything out (her modus operandi was to rifle through the refrigerator and pull out items with the plea, "Quick somebody eat this before it goes bad!").

After she died in 1997, I found her secret cache of documents in the basement. Among them were 4 postcards from France. (Apparently mail from the camps continued throughout the war.)

Postcard From Camp De Gurs These postcards were from the Nazi concentration camp called Gurs in the Pyrenees mountains. She had never told me she had been in a camp. She'd never even told me she wasn't born in Queens until I was in high school.

When I had come home from 7th grade history class asking if she knew what had happened in Germany, she peered at me through those big glasses and "I remember a fence we had run under and some men got made at us." And then she had returned to folding the laundry and I knew not to ask more, but not why.

Before the postcards, my mother was amusing, annoying, and doddering. Afterwards, she was what now? A holocaust survivor? But she didn't have a tattooed number. She hadn't been to Auschwitz. And what about me? Was I the son of a survivor? How could my mother, who made banana Jello and packed me and my father lunch everyday be a survivor?

I didn't understand, and I still don't, and a blog entry is too short to figure it out. But what I do know is that what my mother tried to protect me from still shaped my life, if just through that act of protection. And that I must, in the end, make sense first of her love.

Among the 500 entries for the Blake Prize for Religious Art in Australia are a painting depicting Osama bin Laden as Jesus Christ and a statue of the Virgin Mary covered in a blue burqa familiar to Afghani women that lived under the Taliban. The outrage and the debate—if you can call it that—is predictably stale, because the anti- side if reflexively offended but also because the art itself isn’t good. I don’t know how some artists get away with claiming provocativeness to be the supreme goal of art, especially since—by these standards, at least—anyone out of ideas and marginally shameless can be provocative. If you’re going to get people talking, you should be able to answer them. Otherwise, stun their sleeping asses into woken silence. Also: how is this “religious art”?

Damien Hirst, the obscenely rich and famous British artist, is more complicated. His diamond-encrusted platinum skull was sold today for US $ 10 million. If you’ve ever seen Hirst speak, or even read what he’s said, it’s clear that he’s a performance artist, that the man’s responses to the (eagerly awaited) criticisms of his art are as much a part of the art, more so, even, than the inanimate spectacles themselves. The art never stops, and Hirst is clearly calculating, if not always consciously. The fact that richer he gets the better an artist he becomes is, as far as I can tell, a new one for history. Worse, weirder, is that if you try to protest, you add to it. 

Even if you didn't wake up this morning craving a refresher course on the spread of the world's major religions, you should probably watch the map below, which animates all of religious history in 90 seconds.  Watch as sprinklings of electric blue Christianity pop up in the Middle East, or as green Islam makes its way down Africa's easten coastline, and try not to feel too much like a tiny speck of dust floating in a giant uncaring universe when the tiny speck of hot-pink Judaism appears in the middle of the map in 1948.  (By the way, anyone else find the phrase "Jewish expansion" weird in this context?)  Then check out the map's home site, Maps of War, which is full of other fascinating animated histories.

I am the product of thirteen years of Jewish day schools. I speak Hebrew, and can read and translate a page of Tanach with no problem. I can give you a pretty detailed history of Zionism and the State of Israel, I can tell you everything you could ever want to know about the Holocaust, and I can speak at great length about the importance of being shomer negiah (thought I won’t). But even with such a solid Jewish educational background, there’s a lot that I now realize I never learned. To some extent this is my fault in not asking the right questions, and requesting the right classes. But sadly, in the world of day schools there are still lots of important issues not being discussed—usually because the curriculum is stuck on a few core issues, and rarely ventures to new or more dynamic subjects.

In an informal survey held in my kitchen a week and a half ago, four girls told me they wished they'd learned more about davening, about Israeli politics, about the theologies of all the Jewish movements, and, to quote my little sister, "I wish someone would have told me that not all good Jewish boys are good boys."
These Girls: don't know Jack about Christianity. Oy!
Later that day I sent out mass e-mails to old friends and dayschool alumni, asking what people wished they’d been taught now that they’d had some time to reflect on their education. Though my friends went to a variety of day schools, ranging from Orthodox to Jewish community schools, their answers generally fell into four categories:
1) Things we weren’t taught about Jews/Jewish history
2) Things we weren’t taught about the rest of the world (Christianity specifically, but the secular world in general)
3) Jewcy pieces of our own tradition that were conveniently skipped over because they involved sex, and
4) Sex/sexuality

In the next few weeks I’ll be attacking these issues, showing you some of the things my friends wrote, and giving some tips on how you can make sure that kids in your community, regardless of whether they go to day schools, don’t go to college without knowing the history or culture of non-Ashkenazi Jews, or how to explain sukkot to a Methodist roommate. If you’re a day school grad out there, feel free to leave more ideas in the comments section, or e-mail me directly at tamar@jewcy.com.

In the meantime, I leave you with some highlights from my friends’ responses:

I managed, but i was not provided the tools to convey and articulate to an "outsider" (even Jews sometimes) about Judaism. [Orthodox high school] assumes that everyone is going to live in the Upper West Side of NYC or Skokie Illinois their whole life, and that’s not the case. I needed to know how to talk to my Irish Catholic friend about separating milk and meat. I can not say because it says in the bible "thou shalt not cook thy calf in the thy mother's milk." That is the reason, but that’s not what i'm going to say. I need answers that everyone can understand and not from the Gemorah. We are all going to deal with non-Jews and we will all need to explain why we can't come to work on Simchat Torah.

* the theologies of Jewish movements, yes, but frankly a sense of the flow of Jewish history between the ninth and twentieth centuries outside of ". . .and then there were a lot of pogroms, Goldinah Medina, Holocaust, Israel" would have been nice. A lot of the history we got was in isolation: Now We Shall Study Chasidut. Ok, but what's the context, again?
* along the same lines, Jewish intellectual history between the ninth and twentieth centuries--though this is probably more of a college curriculum. The intellectual history of recent Jewish movements would also be useful. I really have no idea where Orthodoxy, as currently practised, comes from, besides, obviously, Moshe m'Sinai by direct transmission of black velvet kippot.
* Speaking of history: anything at all about the Eidot Mizrah or European Sephardic Jews. After the Christian reconquista non-Ashkenazic Jewry vanished off the educational radar. I assume some things happened between Saadiah Gaon and Shallah Shabbati (and that can be taken in more ways than one, now that I think about it) (though not that way. Hee.), but I don't know what they are.

healthy sex and spirituality. this could include anything from safe sex to safe emotional sex and spirituality anything from ecstatic hassidish stuff to what does sprituality have to do with ritual.

Of course, there are lots of jewcy bits in the Torah (the Nephilim; Judah and
Tamar; Moses's uncircumcized son; seeing God and the saphire brickwork beneath
his feet) that I would have liked to have heard about - for one thing, it might
have made those classes more interesting.

Something that I am becoming more and more aware of, and wish that I had some prior knowledge of, is the difference between Ashkenazi and Sepharadi Jewish communities and histories. There are obvious and basic differences, like foods and traditions, but I think something more important is the history. Growing up and going to day school, I was surrounded by others that were exactly like me- eastern european with some connection to the Holocaust. My identity as a Jew and my ties with the Jewish community had to do with the Holocaust and my family's experiences during the war. However, it is important to know that the Holocaust is not a good connector as not all Jews were touched by the Holocaust. Jewish communities in Tunisia, Algeria, Iran, etc, all had different horrible experiences that were never talked about. Part of our education should have been a more modern Jewish history which should have included the history of Jewish communities in different parts of the world. There are really interesting stories of Jews in China, India, Burma, the Middle East, Africa, and so many other places.

I agree with the God and theology part too. I think that it was very unfortunate that my school chose to focus more on Jewish Law and ritual and very little on actual religious philosophy. Even if it was going to be heavily biased, I would have preferred a bigger focus on the "why?" instead of the "how to."

im gonna have to agree with the God part. it was as if they avoided the topic as a whole. Also the way we prayed really sucked. it was as if the whole point was to race through the service as fast as you could without understanding what you were saying.

That nice Jewish girls and boys are not born with blinders that make them only meet and fall for other nice Jewish girls and boys.
-That there are Reconstructionist, Renewal, Humanist and other denominations of Jews, not just the "big three." And while we're at it, that Reform Jews aren't just "Jews who don't want to do anything."
-That Jews can meditate and commune with nature through Judaism, not just Buddhism.
-That there are loads of amazing Israeli movies out there that can be watched and analyzed, and not just be a babysitter when the teacher is out sick.

From Yalta to Camelot: Schlesinger never missed an opportunity for politicizing the truthWell, one thing I learned from the Times' predictably necrophiliac tribute to  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. is that his father provided the initial boost to what has become one of the most overrated and under-criticized careers in American scholarship. This should immediately signal a point of affinity between Schlesinger and his favorite boy-president, who also had a interested and zealous papa fond of ministering to the budding careers of his male issue.

The word "scholarship" in the above paragraph is actually fungible with the word "politics" when considering the life and influence of Schlesinger. He became, in the unironic words of the Times obituarist, a "loyal soldier" of the Kennedy White House while also acting the part of court stenographer to "Camelot."

Yet this dogged liberal anti-Communist has been heralded as the Macaulay of the New Frontier "brains trust." A reassessment is in order. What we now know, based on multiple freshets of revisionist myth-busting history, is the following about Arthur Schlesinger and his favorite commander-in-chief:

1. Schlesinger convinced the New Republic to kill a correct story on Kennedy's training of Cuban mercenaries in Miami;

2. He mendaciously claimed that those mercenaries amounted to no more than 400 disgruntled residents of Miami, when in fact the number was closer to 4,000;

3. He maintained warm relations with John Newman, Oliver Stone's hand-picked Pentagon whisperer for consultation on the ridiculous and paranoiac film JFK. Newman had argued that Kennedy kept a contingency plan for pulling out of Indochina and was thus committed to peace even before honor when it came to a criminal American bail-out of French colonialism. Schlesinger later insisted that such a plan was proof that had 'Jack' survived past '64, the first "quagmire" of national consciousness -- also sometimes known as our "loss of innocence" -- would have been widely averted. There is substantial reason to disbelieve this.

Le Dem's Nikita: Who was really to blame for the Cuban Missile Crisis?Gary Wills, who himself is an excellent historian when not performing the stations of the cross on behalf of Jimmy Carter, has shown that the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 was an American-orchestrated sequel to the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Soviet thundering about a planned U.S. attempt to overthrow the Castro regime was grounded in fact, not ideological menace, although of course Kennedy would never admit to this in public. Instead, the dire Russian response of a missile build-up in Cuba -- itself designed to get the U.S. to withdraw its own Jupiter arsenal from Turkey -- was signaled as an act of unprovoked Communist aggression in the Western hemisphere. The Cuban Missile Crisis was of Kennedy's own making, in other words, and that a nuclear "exchange" never commenced has been falsely attributed to this fawned-upon president's non-virtue of forbearance and shrewdness under apocalyptic pressure.

As a side note -- if only because the following events had regional, not global, repercussions -- the general under whom Schlesinger served as loyal soldier also targeted for premature extinction Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Congo; Rafael Trujillo, the right-wing autocrat of the Dominican Republic, whom Kennedy feared might spark another Marxist revolution in Latin America; and Ngo Dinh Diem, the repressive president of South Vietnam, whose assassination strengthened Ho Chi Minh's perception that Saigon was a defunct satrapy of Washington and led to a decade-long war in which everyone but Kennedy has been blamed for involving the United States.

Schlesinger, who had previously served in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner outfit to the CIA, always condoned or pardoned regime change when it took the form of a coup, where American sponsorship could be plausibly denied and where executives didn't even have to bother with presentations before the U.N. Security Council, let alone an authorizing vote in Congress.

As to his other great allegiance to another monogrammatic Democrat, Schlesinger's Roosevelt hagiography is only slightly less free and easy with facts and events, albeit bound by an interpretation of them that might be described as "my country, right or wrong."

In 2005, President Bush issued what I thought was a quite noble and honest apology to the peoples of Eastern Europe for their subjection to fifty-plus years of Soviet rule, inaugurated at Yalta. How did Schlesinger respond? With a not-so-fast note to the Huffington Post, arguing that Stalin's gobbling up of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Romania was a fait accompli by the time Roosevelt and Churchill convened with the Red Tsar about postwar spoils. The Great Game was decided by the sheer deployment of forces at battle's end, not by anemic Western diplomacy.

The best response to this act of moral cretinism -- at a time when it was Eastern Europe showing the most loyal commitment to defeating the fascism of Saddam Hussein -- came from Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag and the wife of Radosław Sikorski, Poland's former Minister of National Defence. Talking of the "small crew of liberal historians and Rooseveltians" who think America needn't apologize for its complicity in Russian hegemony, she wrote:

Their charges ignore the breadth of the agreement -- was it really necessary to agree to deport thousands of expatriate Russians back to certain death in the Soviet Union? -- as well as the fact that Yalta and the other wartime agreements went beyond mere recognition of Soviet occupation and conferred legality and international acceptance on new borders and political structures.

Add to this the sinister nod of acquiescence the part of the Anglo-American leadership when it came to the Katyn massacre, wherein more than 22,000 Poles were summarily shot dead, which event Stalin blamed on the Nazis when it was actually carried out, at his behest, by the Red Army.

History with a Bullitt: The prophetic U.S. Ambassador to Russia, William BullittRoosevelt was a dupe, plain and simple. The only official in his administration who was prescient about both Hitler and Stalin was the sadly forgotten proto-cold warrior William Bullitt, an ex-Bolshevik who, as U.S. ambassador to Russia, became a dogged anti-Stalinist. He was also a member of the Free French: Bullitt penned some of the most fiery condemnations of Petain and Vichy. He informed FDR that Stalin was not to be trusted, that Generalissimus was an inveterate double-crosser who'd bully the U.S. into supplying him with munitions and aid and later return the favor by demanding half a war-ravaged continent. In exchange for Lend-Lease, Bullitt argued, a guarantee should be given to Washington and London that Moscow would not seek territorial gains in Europe or Asia -- a proviso that stood a better chance of being confirmed and enforced after Operation Barbarossa caught only the Kremlin master unawares and all Russia came close to becoming the most important possession of Berlin. To this Roosevelt responded:

"I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not... I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return... he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."

The rest, as they say, is history. But how sad that the only ones who would never bring themselves to recognize it as such were the shameless partisan purveyors of conventional wisdom like the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Twelve Tribes: Which are you?Yesterday I posted a question, asking why we refer to ourselves as “Members of THE tribe” instead of “Members of the TRIBES”. In doing so I completely ignored/forgot a basic lesson from my intro to Jewish history class in college (apologies to Dr. Resnick!).

Many thanks to David for refreshing my memory.

So today, in case anyone else has forgotten (or never learned), I thought I’d explain briefly. About the tribes.

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of tribes. 12 to be precise. They were named for the 12 sons of Jacob, Asher, Benjamin, Dan, Gad, Issachar, Joseph, Judah, Levi, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, Zebulun.

But the story gets a little complicated, because when the tribes are granted land in Israel, the tribe of Levi becomes the tribe of priests instead, and the sons of Joseph (Mannaseh and Ephraim) each get their own tribe. So in a way there are 13 tribes. But when we talk about the tribes, we usually talk about the second set of 12, and consider the Levites to be “priests”. Cool?

At any rate, then things get political and complicated. I hope I can explain this clearly, because I’m going somewhere with this…

10 tribes split off and become the Northern kingdom (one of them is a portion of the Levites, the non-landed dudes), and two tribes (Judah and Benjamin) form the Southern kingdom of Judah (along with some more Levites). (Somewhere in here, the tribe of Simeon disappears altogether) Finally, Assyria crushes the North, leaving Judah to become the Jewish nation we know today (in some sense, though it got a lot of crushing of its own over the years of course). Judah gets booted from the land by Nebuchadnezzer, and we all end up in Babylon, man.

But now let’s do the math. WHO is in Judah when the Babylonians get there? Members of at least three tribes—Judah, Benjamin, and Levi (at least some of them). They’re all hanging around in the South.

Which means that although David was right in drawing my attention to the fact that we’re all descended from members of the Southern nation of Judah, we’re not all from one tribe.

Which leads me to believe that when we say we’re “Members of the Tribe” we’re using the term loosely, generally. We’re all Jews. But in fact, we’re members of the “Tribes”. Plural. Have to be, since anyone named Levy or Cohen (the Kohanim are Levites too) cannot, by definition, be from the tribe of Judah.

Eh?

Eh?

Anyone want to argue?

Blood Libel: Pass the Matzah!Today the Jerusalem Post turns our attention to a new book by an Israeli Historian... a book about BLOOD LIBEL!

Blood libels against the Jews were a common form of anti-Semitism during the Middle Ages, though there is no ritual involving human blood in Jewish law or custom. Though the first recorded instance was in the writings of Apion, who claimed that the Jews sacrificed Greek victims in the Temple, there are no existent records of the blood libel against the Jews from that period until the legend surrounding William of Norwich in the 12th century, first recorded in the Peterborough Chronicle, but the libel afterward became an increasingly common accusation. In many cases, anti-Semitic blood libels served as the basis for a blood libel cult, in which the alleged victim of human sacrifice was worshipped as a Christian martyr, but the claim has pre-Christian origins. Many Jews were killed as a result of false blood libels, which continued into the 20th century, with the Beilis Trial in Russia and the Kielce pogrom in Poland, and the persistence of blood libel stories in the Arab world.

But most of you already knew that, and blood libel is old news (although there are still cases today).  So why is this new news? 

Because Ariel Toaff's book, Bloody Passovers: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders, suggests something crazy.  It claims that some super-fundamentalist Jews actually DID carry out human sacrifices!!!  No shit! 

Toaff refers to kabbalistic descriptions of the therapeutic uses of blood and asserts that "a black market flourished on both sides of the Alps, with Jewish merchants selling human blood, complete with rabbinic certification of the product - kosher blood.

Yow-zA!

Of course, however horrible this is, it creates an obvious need for some serious Jewish vampire literature.  Anyone want to co-write a Hassidic goth-thriller with me?

This is Ashkenazi? According to Google it is!After discussing the dilemma of the words we don't really know the meaning of and the resulting need to go back and re-learn some things, I woke up this morning with the realization that there's a Jewishy word I use without any real background: Ashkenazi.

In my lame-ass understanding of the term, an Ashkenazi Jew is someone whose family:

1. at some point spoke Yiddish

2. lived in Poland or thereabouts

3. looked Hassidic

That's about it for my sense of what that word means. Though if I wrote my own Jewish dictionary, it might say simply Ashkenazic- NOT Sephardic. (another only vaguely understood term... but we'll get to it later)

But then I got to thinking that I have no idea why a bunch of Polish motherfuckers speak German, and I have no idea when they got to where they got, or how long they stayed. Turns out...

... they arrived in northern France (we assume from the middle east) and the Rhineland sometime around 800-1000 CE, the Ashkenazi Jews brought with them both Rabbinic Judaism and the Babylonian Talmudic culture that underlies it. European Jews became called "Ashkenaz" because the main centers of Jewish learning were located in Germany. "Ashkenaz" is a Medieval Hebrew name for Germany.

But they didn't stay forever. It follows that...

With the onset of the Crusades, and the expulsions from England (1290), France (1394), and parts of Germany (1400s), Jewish migration pushed eastward into Poland, Lithuania, and Russia.

So some of these families were in Germany for as long as 700 years, and some as few as 200 years. In most cases, much longer than they were in Poland or wherever, and a helluva lot longer than we've been in the United States so far.

The other question I have about this relates to a rough sense that Sephardic Jews were classier and smarter and better off than Ashkenzic Jews for a long time... but at some point lost their clout. I've heard such rumors, and would like to look into the matter, but this post is already too long.... so maybe after I've had my coffee.

I got to thinking today about how I’m not really someone who reads a lot of non-fiction.  When I was in college, I had trouble “getting into” my textbooks, and though I can handle the occasional biography, I have to admit that I’m just plain lazy when it comes to fact-finding. 

Which means that a lot of what I know I learned from fiction.  And while that can be dangerous (bearing in mind my confession about my knowledge of Israeli history) it’s also true that fiction is a great place to start learning about Jewish culture, religious tradition, and ritual.  Maybe not the place to get your “facts” but a good place for a secular-ish Jew to begin understanding the roots and faith of her religion.  I remember distinctly that I learned about Jewish baby-buying and the Jewish need to salt meat from the All of a Kind Family.

So I thought I’d link to a few of my favorite all-time-good-reading-books, books  that I’ve found especially helpful for inspiring the right questions, books that provide a sense of culture and tradition, and I thought I’d ask what books taught YOU something about being Jewish?  Or taught you something about how NOT to be Jewish?

In My Father’s Court  (my dad claims this is the best partially fictive memoir ever written)

Portnoy’s Complaint  (for dirty naughty  Jews and/or contrarians)

As a Driven Leaf  (you wouldn't think the Talmudic age would be so un-boring)

Davita’s Harp  (hugely important for me as an interfaith-baby, and an angsty teen)

Shosha  (dybbuks, weird fornication, WWII Poland, and American actresses... tragic and moving)

Call It Sleep (ghetto Jews in New York, rough boys, and hard dialect)

Since I’m 17, it’s not hard for me to remember a time when Hanukkah was my favorite holiday because of the presents. It’s even less of a stretch to think back to that traumatic moment which parallels the day a Christian child finds out that there is no Santa Claus: The day that someone told me that not only is the practice of Hanukkah gift-giving uniquely American, but that it is a patronizing practice designed to keep Jewish kinderlach from feeling left out around Christmas. It is now fairly common knowledge among American Jewry that Hanukkah is traditionally a minor holiday. Still, the history is important. I am here to provide you with a bit of Hanukkah 101.

In Judaism, we constantly strive to look to our texts for justification. Looking through the Tanach, the Hanukkah story is mysteriously absent. If we look to the books known as Macabees I and II—Jewish texts, though not part of the Tanach—we find the true story. The Jews are being oppressed by foreign rulers. They desecrate the Temple. A group of rebels known as the Macabees arise and toss them out.

Here is where the story you were raised on disappears. When the Jews recapture the Temple, there is no mention of the Ner Tamid or oil or any miracle or anything of the sort. Instead, they celebrate the holiday of Sukkot, which they were unable to celebrate that year because they were not allowed them into the Temple. The celebration of Sukkot lasts 8 days and nights (sound familiar?). The Macabees, who then install themselves as the Hasmonean dynasty, declare that from hence forth there shall be an eight day celebration at this time of the year.

This is where the story gets really juicy. What happened to the original story? How come it was replaced by the tale of miracles we have now?

To give you a picture of how unimportant this holiday was in Talmudic times, every Jewish holiday has a volume of the Talmud devoted to it—except Hanukkah. Hanukkah is only mentioned once, in Tractate Shabbat. The Rabbis are engrossed in a discussion on various materials which one can use for Shabbat candles. They stumble across the question of whether the same things apply to the Hanukkah candles.

The decision on the issue is irrelevant, but their explanation of the story is interesting. "When the Hellenists entered the sanctuary, they defiled all the oil that was found there. When the… Hasmoneans prevailed… oil was sought… and only one vial was found… The vial contained sufficient oil for one day… a miracle occurred, and it fed the… lamp eight days."

Why the change? The Hasmonean dynasty was anti-Rabbinic so the Rabbis had trouble celebrating a holiday about the dynasty’s military victory. They also felt that since they were living under foreign rule at the time, such a nationalist holiday would be seen as dangerous. So they turned it into the religious holiday we celebrate today.

I wasn’t alive for Woodstock.

 I wasn’t around during the Stonewall Riots.

To me, Nixon is an angry guy with a big nose in a jar on Futurama.

I do know all about the day Lincoln was shot. But of course, there was a movie about that.